Richard Holmes was born in London in 1945 and educated at Downside School and Churchill College, Cambridge.In 1974 his Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Award and was described by Stephen Spender as 'surely the best biography of Shelley ever written'. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded an OBE in 1992 and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Prize in 2014.He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.